It takes a village to manage digital collections over time. When you work with a service provider like TDL, you will need to align your local workflows, practices, and policies to your provider’s services. You will be collaborating with internal and external service providers to achieve your digital preservation goals.
This is an excerpt from the DPM Workshop Management Tools: Digital Content Workflows. The diagram shows the steps of managing digital content from Decide to Acquire Digital through to Make Digital Content Available, The diagram also highlights the roles that are involved with digital content management, including Content Curators (CC) with responsibility for making decisions about digital content (what to acquire, how to process and package it, when to make it available); Digital Preservation (DP) with over-time responsibility to ensure the infrastructure is in place to manage, preserve, and protect the digital content across generations of technology; Information Technology (IT) who manages the software, hardware, and other required technological resources; and Provider (P), especially external, who provide services for life cycle management of digital content.
In this context, the Hand in the diagram represents the handshake that occurs to transfer digital content from the creator or producer to the life cycle management environment to be processed, preserved and managed over time.
TDL is a good example of a provider of digital preservation services that helps members to make use of the Ingest tools, DP storage options, and monitoring services TDL supports. Members decide what content to acquire and arrange for its transfer then work with TDL to do the handshake between the member’s local environment and TDL’s service environment.
Question(S) for your team/organization: How preservation-ready ready is your digital content? Are you making the best use of available DP services? What’s next for you? TDL members contact TDL for more information and assistance.
Sources: Using approaches developed by and for the Digital Preservation Management (DPM) Workshop curriculum and resources. See the resources below for additional information, examples, and current information.
Related Resources:
DPM Model: Five Stages and Three-legged Stool (2003 Article) (cheatsheet) (3-legged stool)
Capacity Building and Roles (video)
DPM Workshop: Gap Analysis (cheatsheet)
DPM Workshop Tutorial: Administration
TDL Decision Tree: Do you have a roadmap of your digital content to preserve?
DPM management Tools: Digital Content Review - Template with sections to delineate potential implications of acquiring, preserving, and making available a digital content type over time
DPM Tutorial topics: Selecting Assets for Preservation
TDL Decision Tree FAQ: What does ‘well-managed collections’ mean and how do I achieve it?
DPM DP Management Tools: DP Workflows (video) - including life cycle handshakes
TDL Decision Tree:
Beyond the Repository Curatorial Toolkit: Moving Forward Module:
This is a joint initiative between TDL Digital Preservation Services and the Digital Preservation Management (DPM) Workshop and Global Archivist LLC. Dr. Nance McGovern 2024.